In Sükhbaatar Square, in the centre of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, there is a gigantic colonnade monument to Genghis Khan, seated and facing south. Along the sides of the square, the Government Palace, an old Soviet-style post office and a neoclassical opera house all date to Mongolia’s socialist period. The monument to Genghis Khan, though, was put up in 2006, and an even more colossal statue of the Khan astride a horse, fifty kilometres east of the city, was completed in 2008. There is an odd tension in this – the static nomad, the monument to mobility – and a banner in Sukhbaatar Square, directly in the sightline of the seated Khan, proclaims Ulaanbaatar the ‘City of Nomads’, another faint contradiction.